Friday I got so tired I couldn’t stay awake any longer–it was only 4pm. I slept until midnight. When I woke up I found myself wishing I lived in a 24 hour town, like Vegas or something. I don’t think Hayward even has a 24 hour cafe. Anyway…

I waited until dawn, then I got cleaned up and went down to Starbucks. I brought my laptop with me, hoping they’d have Internet. I think most have T-mobile Hotspots now. But I’ve never used it so I wouldn’t know. Anyway…

Turns out they do indeed have the T-mobile Hotspot thingy. I was handed a brochure. I read. What the fuck is this bullshit?

Check out these prices:
1 day = $10
Month to month = $40 per month
Month to month with a 1 year contract = $30 per month
Pay as you go = $6 per login good for one hour, $0.10 per minute after that.

Is that not ridiculous? Cable and DSL is cheaper than this.

So I sit there, thinking about which plan won’t hurt the most. I rarely take my laptop to Starbucks to hang out, so none of these plans make sense to me.

I turn on the laptop and it starts to roam. It finds like 8 networks, no shit. 3 of them are wide fucking open.

I shrug. Ah what the hell? I pick the one with the best signal and… I’m in! What a great signal it was too, very good connection, great speeds. I surfed the web and even played a little Diablo2 on Battlenet. I downloaded a couple movie clips just to see how fast it was–it was fast.

Fuck Starbucks and T-mobile. Just for fun I tried the other 2 wide open networks. I was able to surf just fine. I wonder if these people know that their WAPs are wide open to the public?

Better yet, I wonder if Starbucks and/or T-mobile know that savvy users are logging into free wireless access points and taking business away from them?

Ha HA! Power to the people! Free the Internet!

[edit]
So. What do you guys think? Was I stealing those people’s bandwidth? I mean, their WAPs were wide open, no encryption, no passwords, nothin’. They have to know that people are using their connection… So was what I did, wrong? And also, was it wrong to circumvent the Starbucks T-mobile wireless Internet connection scam? Am I obligated to use their network if I’m sitting in their cafe?